Website Timeline: Month One of HomeWorkingClub

When I started HomeWorkingClub a few months ago, I began a website timeline to keep track of key milestones in the development of the site.

Website projects are not really suited to people who are looking for instant gratification. It takes a considerable amount of time to build traffic, outreach to other sites, and establish any kind of following. It takes longer still to establish any meaningful stream of income!

HomeWorkingClub remains very much at the start of its website timeline, but there are still some achievements to be cautiously proud of.

As an impatient individual, it’s sometimes down to my wife to remind me of those achievements, to prevent me throwing the towel in and spending more time doing freelance work for other people! This is far from being the first such project I’ve undertaken, so I should know very well that sometimes the pace of a new site can be rather glacial at times. Despite this knowledge, maintaining motivation can still prove challenging on certain days!

On those days, it’s important to remember the achievements that have already been made. For example:

In the three months HomeWorkingClub has been in operation, around 3,500 unique visitors have already read our content, and spent an average of 3.5 minutes on the site. This is a very strong “time on page.”

The site has a long way to go; With thousands of genuine home working opportunities out there, writing about them all, with the level of detail we intend, is going to take a very long time. It’s going to take years to become the definitive resource for this but we do intend to!

Anyway, I decided that it could be fun to share the website timeline I’ve been keeping a record of. I figured it could be of interest to other aspiring bloggers. I’d be fascinated to receive any feedback too – Are we doing well? Are we doing dreadfully? Are YOU doing a whole lot better?! The place to tell us is in the comments.

So, without further ado, here’s the first month of the HomeWorkingClub.com website timeline. Make sure you subscribe at the bottom if you want to be certain to see the next installments.

Website Timeline: Month 1

27th March: Started building the site. (The theme was already chosen, and I am thankfully well-versed in hosting, WordPress, and all the other related stuff).

Some key points about this website timeline

To put all of this into a little perspective, here are some key points about the timeline, and the answers to some questions you may wish to ask:

How long did everything take?

Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a record of how long everything took! During this first month I was still working several days per week on other projects (as I am to this day), so much of the work was done during evenings and weekends. Several of the early articles on this site were finished around 4am!

Aside from producing content, there were various small pieces of work that had to be completed: signing up to affiliate schemes, setting up email autoresponders, and configuring lots of server things like caching plugins, CDNs and backups. Fortunately, this is all stuff I already knew how to do, but if you’re new to setting up websites, you can assume it will take a while to learn as you go.

Did we buy any traffic?

No. Although HomeWorkingClub now pays a small amount to promote some posts on social media, I didn’t start any of this in the first month.

What do the figures look like now?

You’ll have to wait for the next installment for that! But suffice to say everything is growing at a reasonable rate!

What lessons were learned during this first month?

Everyday’s a school day when you’re working on a new project, but with this one, the lessons have come thick and fast! The main things I know now that I didn’t know three months ago are:

Testing home working opportunities and doing it properly takes a LOT of time. Aside from the time spent building the site, there’s been as much, if not more, time spent trying out sites like ClickWorker and UserTesting so that we can provide full and honest reviews.

Guest posts and links take a long time to deal with; While we’ve done well getting featured on high-profile sites, sometimes weeks can elapse between agreeing on a post and actually seeing it published.

You can only work 18-hour days for so long before it catches up with you!

I started HomeWorkingClub because I have a genuine passion for helping people establish their own income without being stifled by a traditional job. Thankfully, I’m still as fired up about it as I was at the start, which is essential for a labour of love like this one.

Sharing the progress of the site itself was never part of the original plan, but with plenty of home working businesses involving websites, I thought putting this information out there might be interesting and helpful for some readers. If you’ve found it useful, I’d be delighted if you’d comment below, and subscribe to the site so you can see future updates. Good luck with your own web projects!

About Author

Founder of HomeWorkingClub.com - Ben is a long-established freelancer with a passion for helping other people take control of their destiny and break away from "working for the man." Prone to outbursts of bluntness and realism.